Developing Sustainability Metrics for Agriculture using Life Cycle Assessments

There are at least five active programs to define and measure sustainable agricultural practices in the United States.  These programs are motivated by market forces, production ethics, and retail distribution requirements.  Developing a set of common practices in measuring and assessing sustainable production practices is desirable in order to prevent conflicting and confusing market signals. Life cycle assessments provide a method of quantifying processes throughout the production supply chain in order to compare and innovate practices.  However, those analyses must be based upon a set of metrics that are rational indicators of the parameters of concern.  These metrics must include measurements of environmental, social, and economic state conditions in order to reflect sustainable production conditions.  These metrics are often merged into a single index in order to simplify comparisons.  Indexing of metrics is a normative process, requiring significant attention to legitimacy criteria in policy-making.  These criteria include representation, equity, efficacy, and implementability. Most sustainability labels associated with agricultural production do not meet this criteria, and have significant unintended consequences, especially on poor and disenfranchised producers. A unified method for developing, approving, and implementing LCAs, metric development, and index implementation is recommended.